Hey everyone 👋

We're Theo and Axel — cofounders of Prism.

TL;DR

Prism is an AI-native recruiting agency. You brief us on a Slack channel. We source, engage, and screen the candidates. You step in to interview and make the offer. You pay 15% of first-year salary when someone we find signs.

The engine underneath is the best people search in the world. We score 89.6 on the Public Sourcing Benchmark. This puts us 21+ points ahead of every published baseline and the benchmark was built and published by one of our direct competitors.

Ask: Hiring, or know someone who is? Reply here, DM, or grab a slot: https://cal.com/theokitsberg/30mins

❌ The Problem

Hiring is a company killer. Founders spend a third of their time on it. Bad hires cost more than missed quarters. Good hires change companies.

And yet the work itself is brutal. Inbound is 95% noise. Outbound competes with everyone else's outbound. Agencies are slow, expensive, and opaque. Software dumps thousands of half-relevant profiles on your desk and walks away.

The hardest part of hiring isn't picking the tool. It's doing the work.

🛠️ Our Solution: an AI-native agency, built on the best people search in the world

The best people search, independently verified. 89.6 on the Public Sourcing Benchmark. 21+ points clear of the next system. The benchmark was built and published by Lessie, one of our direct competitors. The judge is Gemini, not us. The methodology was pre-registered and the queries and harness are public. Anyone can reproduce it. Read the full paper here: tryprism.com/papers/people-search-benchmark.pdf

Calibration, not just keywords. We extract the hidden hiring criteria buried in your JD and your past hires. A few thumbs-up / thumbs-down on early candidates and the search converges fast.

Outreach that converts. We engage candidates across LinkedIn, email, and WhatsApp, with messages calibrated to the role and the person.

Scale agencies physically can't match. We run dozens of searches in parallel today, every step instrumented. A traditional agency on a senior role has one human reading 20 profiles at a time. We read the whole web at once and use human time only where it actually matters.

You brief us on Slack. We hand you a shortlist. You handle the parts a founder should, which in our view are the interviews and the offer. Everything else is on us.

Pricing: $500 retainer to kick off a search. 15% of first-year salary when someone we find signs.

👬 The Team

Theo (CEO) — Cambridge dropout. Built and ran recruiting and training for a UK crisis helpline. Published research with MIT’s Media Lab.

Axel (CTO) — Oxford dropout. Previously founder associate at Alan, the French healthtech unicorn, where he worked on internal recruiting infra.

(+ an amazing founding engineer and amazing in-house recruiter, both hired with Prism!)

🙏 Our Ask

🔵 Hiring? Run a search with us. Reply, DM, or grab a slot: https://cal.com/theokitsberg/30mins

🔵 Looking for your next role? Meet Ray, our AI career advisor. One conversation and we'll match you with companies hiring people like you. Free here, takes a few minutes

Thanks!

Theo & Axel